KGO Radio closes its South Bay bureau

One of the sadder stories in local broadcasting has unfolded in San Jose over the last week. After more than four decades, KGO radio has closed its South Bay bureau. Here at IA, we’re told it was done in a particularly sudden and ugly way: Two officials with Cumulus Media, which bought the station four years ago, showed up last Friday at the station’s offices on Julian Street and told veteran reporters Jennifer Hodges and Jeannie Lynch to pack their belongings and turn in their keys. They were being laid off with severance checks and cash to travel home.

The closure leaves only a couple of major stations with a significant presence in San Jose: KCBS, which has the peripatetic Mike Colgan, and KQED, which has Rachael Myrow and Beth Willon in its downtown bureau. Among the folks upset with the KGO retrenchment is San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, whom Hodges covered during the campaign and his first six months in office. Liccardo said he had registered his displeasure with Lee Hammer, a top KGO official, saying that “it wouldn’t serve the station well to abandon the region’s biggest city and hope that folks could simply phone it in.”

We could not get comment from Cumulus. But it’s clear that the closure has a background in corporate pain. Lew and John Dickey, the brothers who run Cumulus, made an ambitious and expensive bet in 2011 when they bought Citadel Broadcasting, which owned KGO and several large AM stations. Cumulus has not performed well recently. Its net revenue for the first three months of 2015 was down by 7 percent from the year before. Cumulus stock has been hovering recently at just above $2 a share, near its all-time low.